My understanding of the ISO spec is that if there is no time zone, it is assumed to be in local time. Since seismology uses mostly UTC, I think it would be good to require the 'Z' to indicate UTC on the times. That way it is the time that specifies the time zone and so general purpose parsers will do the right thing.
So make it:
Date and time in one form of ISO 8601, specifically YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[.SSSSSS]Z